Puerto Rico hypergamy fact of the day

In Puerto Rico, women already outearn men — in 2009, women’s wages were 103 percent of men’s. In other regions, women are close to catching up: in the District of Columbia, with a high number of federal workers and a high proportion of minorities, women earn 88 percent of what men do…Among 25- to 34-year-olds working full-time, women’s earnings were 91 percent of men’s in 2010, up from 68 percent in 1979.

The text has subtitles like “Women Will Have to Learn to Appreciate New Qualities in Men.”

Here is a paper on “the end of hypergamy,” it has fragments like “we estimate a female hypergamy parameter, following Mare’s example (1991),” plus it introduces me to the word “hypogamy.” The key sentence I suppose is this:

This means that the gender gap in education accounts for almost 80% of the cross-country and within country variance in observed hypergamy.

And it is stated:

According to our results, if current trends in education are to continue the end of hypergamy is near.

That would be for recorded marriages, but at what rate of marriage might such an equalization take place? This paper on hypergamy suggests that marriage rates are falling predominantly for the less educated women; Betsey Stevenson has work on related topics. It is a puzzle for the extreme hypergamy theorists why the rate of marriage for educated women has not fallen lower than it has.

This paper on hypergamy suggests that marriage rates are falling predominantly for the less educated women;… It is a puzzle for the extreme hypergamy theorists why the rate of marriage for educated women has not fallen lower than it has.

May be the less educated women (say, college dropouts) marry men with even lesser education (say high school drop outs), and that might not be the case with highly educated women?

I think this is more of a numeric artifact produced by declining marriage rates, and an error in over-attribution of status to income. As you and other commenters have pointed out:

1) Hypergamy is not synonymous with mating with alphas, only ‘the best she can get’. Or ‘better than she is used to’.
2) If male status signals are less dependent upon income, then they will be more dependent upon physical traits, relationships and behavior. In other words, men who are underemployed will find alternate means of signaling. The eastern european and Mediterranean (PIGS) males manage to do this effectively already. So do african american males. They exaggerate masculine traits which cast higher income males as effeminate. In other words, traditional masculine traits and physicality compensate for income signals. I don’t know why this is surprising. Males vary more than females in ability. There are always ‘unfit’ males that women must ‘marry down’ or ‘mate down’ with. Simply because without polygamy or serial marriages, some portion of women must always ‘settle’ because of the scarcity of ‘good’ men.
3) This change is occurring only in the lower classes. And only relates to marriages not mates.
4) The combined burden of unemployed and unemployable males and dependent females will have a higher impact on the state’s finances and the polity than any change in mating patterns. THis will further undermine the institution of marriage and individual accountability (as Murray suggests.)

But in essence, I think as economists we overrate income. It’s just one of the available signals. And since women and men have different reproductive strategies, and since men vary more than women in ability, it is quite possible for men to adapt without impact to traditional masculine and feminine gender concepts that are outside of the economic sphere.

Actually, most of the investment bankers I met were masculine alpha males. IBs, like most Ivies, put a lot of emphasis masculine alpha traits like athletics, leadership, and charisma. There are a lot of nerdy quants, because good quant work requires such high IQ you have a small pool to select from, but the run of the mill IBer that is golfing with people and trying to win their business is a steryotypical alpha male. Think Don Draper or the Winklevoss twins. To be a true alpha you need top physical and mental ability.

The jobs you describe go to low IQ men. They have physical alphaness, but not mental alphaness. That is why they are doing shitty jobs like swinging a hammer all day. Believe me, they would do better if they could.

The modern mating maket is indeed raising the value of low IQ masculine men (not for marraige, but for sex) while lowering for value of nerdy high IQ low masculinity men (mostly for sex, and less for marraige). High masculinity high IQ true alphas are still doing way better then either group.

Good points all around in this thread, asdf. The real 1% are now those men that are tops in both looks and personality in addition to socioeconomic status, tapping all aspects of female hypergamy, not just income.

These are the types OWSers, who are none of these things, have in mind while they’re protesting and banging on drums in Zucotti Park, since they’re unable to be banging anything else.

The 1% are psychopaths. Let’s not confuse ability with “ability being used to improve the world.” Value transfer is easier then value creation, and the 1% specialize in value transfer. I paint a broad brush obviously, but I feel very comfortable describing >50% of the 1% as psycopaths. Being alpha almost requires some degree of psycopathy.

As for OWS people my experience is that hippie chicks are really easy. Attractive unemployed people have zero difficulty banging young sluts.

Psychopaths, really? That’s awfully reductionist. I suppose you feel like everyone more successful than you is a psychopath and everyone less successful than you is dysfunctional loser, sorta like the old George Carlin joke about driving.

My experience convinced me exactely the opposite. When I was young I thought the world was just. When I got older and worked in IB and other “value transferance” industries with incredibly high salaries I realized it wasn’t.

maguro – probably at least 1% of the population is either psychopathic or sociopathic. Both tend to correlate with intelligence, so it’s not really surprising that at the highest income levels, there’s a heavy preponderance of psychopaths and sociopaths. The NYT had some stats on who was in the 1%. About a quarter were physicians of some sort, another quarter were lawyers, and another quarter were various high-level managers. While I don’t have reason to believe that doctors are particularly more pyschopathic or sociopathic than the general population, the other two groups are, because those fields (as well as in some parts of finance, another source of 1%ers) reward unethical behavior which stays just this side of illegal.

Typical elitist crap. In a way, maybe, an Ivy League neo-classical economist, for instance, may demonstrate intelligence by coming up with some convoluted theory that can’t be proved or disproved. For that he gets an office and tenure. Big deal. When a plumber finishes a piping project it actually has to function correctly. Water has to come out of the tap, sewage has to drain away. He has to be able to rig heavy lifts safely and solve problems every day that would stump either Galbraith. It’s one of the great canards that men that work with their hands are intellectual inferiors to those that deal with abstractions.

The discussion wasn’t about compensation, it was about intelligence. Society doesn’t determine the pay scale of bankers, interlocking directorates guided by compensation committees do. The recent posting that advanced the theory that financial pros should pay for their opportunities for bonuses, like pole dancers do, makes more sense.

But Rahul, why do bankers make more than engineers? Indeed, the top bankers make more than winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Why does a CEO make more than the winner of a Fields Metal?

The answer, of course, is that banks (like CEOs) control flows of money, and can skim off the top of these flows. Who gets access to these flows is determined by who can rise up within status hierarchies to obtain the positions granted by the owners.

Of course, they do have to win in that competition in order to get the big money. But they also have to be a member of the right social class, and have the right social connections, and besides all that, have the right timing, in order to enter the competition.

The Nobel Prize is a much more open competition than the top of the corporate world, which is why there are so many winners from less privileged class backgrounds. In a fair competition, in any intellectual domain, I feel confident that Nobel Laureates in hard sciences would defeat CEOs and investment bankers. However, it’s merely a pretense of the bankers that the existing state of affairs is one where the best rise up to make the most money, or that pay reflects what “society” values.

(At best, corporate pay reflects what stock-holders value, which is very different from “society”! However, even a CEO who sends his corporation into bankruptcy will be paid in proportion to the size of the flow of money which he controls. If a corporation has 10,000 employees, its CEO will out-earn almost all of the greatest minds the human race has produced.)

Andrew Cady: The reverse may hold as well. I am a former scientist (by training – mathematician) turned into a small businessman (a software house with some 20 people).

Money are a huge distraction in life of a scientist, especially if you earn them later in life (as opposed to some scions of rich families who concentrated themselves on science from an early age, accustomed to luxury).

With wealth come societal obligations, some kind of fame, interest of women, expensive mechanical toys for adults (Porsche?), and hosts of fair-weather friends yearning for a small loan.

Science requires almost fanatical devotion of time and energy, and these things get in a way.

Plumbers aren’t worth a damn without the egghead engineers who design the acqueducts, the water treatment systems, the reservoir systems, etc. And you need the capitalists to finance those projects. Good plumbers are a dime a dozen. People who can design and build complex systems are less common, and require more intelligence.

lol. Most ‘ibankers’ are terrified analysts and associates, posturing outside of business hours while nervously glancing at that little red blinking light on their blackberry.
most traders used to be assholes, but now the nerds have completely triumphed, so if you cant do a modicum of programming you are off somewhere on the unemployment que.

Interesting theory. Guess I must have been a closet fairy all those years in the Army. Airborne, infantry NCO, making All-Army in a contact sport… just over-compensation for being a girly man I guess.

I came out of the closet as an intelligent person after I got out, kicked ass in undergrad, went to law school, and am now a pretty successful mid-career attorney. I guess I’m still compensating though by renovating my house in my spare time and doing all the work myself (plumbing and finish carpentry are the gayest of the Alpha building trades, I’m told) and by fixing my old truck myself when it breaks down. Yep, total last dog in the pack, that’s me. Amazing I got married and reproduced at all, such is my testosterone deficiency.

I doubt on a physiological level (possibly for black men). Culturally, absolutely. Western European men have been feminized due to the pervasive influence of feminism (and the subsequent withdrawal of men). However, these same men are descended from the Vikings, Celts, Goths, Vandals, etc that were feared (and noted for their courage and ferocity by the civilized societies of the times – Greek, Roman, Muslim, etc).

Can it be reversed? Probably only when the inevitable collapse occurs and feminism (and socialism) goes with it.

Feminization of West European culture has a lot to do with the successive wiping out of two whole generations of men during WWI and WWII. With so many males dead, injured, or gone mad, women played a big part in shaping modern Europe.

Having extensively traveled all over the Eastern Europe, I must say that your conclusion is shaky.

E.E. women often marry outside E.E., because

a) parts of the region are severely underdeveloped, with things like indoors plumbing still missing, and unemployment topping 50%. Compared to this, prospects of living in, say, the Netherlands are almost magical.

b) a significant per cent of E.E. men are, let us say it openly, alcoholics. The pervasiveness of heavy drinking in E.E. is shocking. Even in Czechia, which is a rather developed country, we have a large alcohol problem, with 5% of the adult population being physically addicted. Further to the East, no reliable statistics exist. Most women do not want a heavy drunkard, if they can avoid it.

1) Hypergamy doesn’t have to be about money. An ugly nerd girl with a good income may marry a hunky dude with a high school diploma and still be marrying up. In this case, she is marrying up the attractiveness scale. What’s important for hypergamy isn’t money (though it can be), but rather that the man is better then the woman in some way. Sugar mommas exist too.

2) Focusing on marraige is a bad indicator. Most eduacted women show their hypergamy by not marrying until they are older. The most useful indicator of female sexual decisions isn’t who she settles down with in her 30s when its baby time. Its who she has sex with in her attractive younger years (teens and early 20s). Marrying a beta herb at 30+ when your sexual desire and desireability are on the down slope is no indication that hypergamy is dead.

3) Lower class women don’t marry because there is no incentive to. Upper class women marry because there is an incentive to. Once again we shouldn’t be looking at marraige, but rather who they are having sex with in their prime years.

4) “Women Will Have to Learn to Appreciate New Qualities in Men.”

Is another way of saying earning power will be devalued relative to sexiness. This doesn’t change hypergamy, it only redistibutes what women are valuing.

5) I think the best indicator of female hypergamy is fertility. Educated woman are literally choosing to be genetic dead ends, they aren’t even replacing themselves. Only in genetic desperation do they squirt out 0-2 kids with whoever they settle for in their 30s.

Why is it remotely important who a woman is with (but not having kids with) in her 20s, any more than it is important who she was holding hands with in 6th grade? Women have discovered a sort of cryptic female choice (the difference from other species that practice it is that in other species, the male doesn’t know she has discarded his sprerm, whereas in humans the male knows but simply doesn’t care), and human sex is no longer human mating.

Because the main thing a man wants is sex. And the main sex he wants is with young hot fertile women. So the man getting sex with young hot fertile women is the top man.

Marraige is nothing more then a contract to exchange property/labor for sex (and some guarantee of paternity). A variation on prostitution. Men who can’t get sex without marraige have to get married to have sex. Men who can’t get women to have their babies and raise them without marraige have to marry (in our legal environment men with property can ahve it confiscated if they knock a girl up, so they are wary of having unprotected sex).

I think this raises an interesting point: One way in which women can mate “up” is by hooking up with young men when they are themselves of cougar age. Their career success raises their status enough for them to stay in the mating market for young men. I’m not sure if the cougar phenomenon is growing (anecdotally it seem to be), though we do know that the average age gap between the first marriage age of men and women has now closed to a single year. I’m guessing that the losers in the new market are older men, who once used their wealth to compensate for their prima facie unattractive age. As women get wealth of their own, their attraction preferences will shift away from partner-wealth and on to other partner qualities.

“One way in which women can mate “up” is by hooking up with young men when they are themselves of cougar age. Their career success raises their status enough for them to stay in the mating market for young men.”

nah. the problem with this hypothesis is that it doesn’t bear out in the real world. there is not a trend of cougars mating and dating younger men, despite wishful thinking feminist hues and cries to the contrary. women generally prefer older men because age itself is one indicator of male status. and younger men, just as much as older men, want to have sex with younger women. cougars instinctually know this, which is why those few who have short-lived flings with horndog younger men harbor no expectations that it will turn into anything more substantial than a romp in the hay. when the cougar really wants to settle down and fall in love, she seeks out older men than herself. you need look no further than dating ad profiles for evidence of this in action.

While Cougars may be increasing, this is simply due to the lack of ‘quality’ older men available. Younger men will sleep with older women if younger women are unavailable (or simply unwilling). The lower the ‘quality’ the male, the greater the likelihood he will be willing to stick around. I recall a few years ago a show on this where (generally unattractive) older women were discussing dating younger men. Of course, it had the b.s. feminist spin that they were uninterested in older men and that they were on the lookout for attractive young men for either casual or serious relationships. The only men that actually married these women were definitely low beta males with few options. The ones shown flirting with them were still beta but had better options for long-term prospects, but sex with an older plump woman was seen as fine.

Young Alpha males won’t waste their time with cougars if they can date young women.

I think Cougars are simply the ‘leftovers’ who didn’t marry when they had the chance (wasted their fertile years) or never had any real options.

It’s been my observation that the cougar phenomenon is largely a media fiction. Which isn’t to say that women never marry significantly younger men, but it’s so rare that I think that it’s fair to assume that income patterns aren’t going to change things. Realistically men marrying significantly younger women is less common as well.

Unfortunately for women, there are biological factors related to aging that prevent them from renegotiating this sort of selection effectively.

Only in an anachronistic sense. At the risk of sounding like Bill Clinton, sex with birth control isn’t really mating. It’s, as another commenter said, basically like holding hands in sixth grade, except the men involved don’t realize that yet.

Assuming what you described is all true, we have a situation where more masculine men are having a lot more sex but a lot fewer children. One would expect evolution to drive the western male to be more and more feminine, which seems to be roughly what’s occurring. The alpha are dying off. They’re dying happy, but dying nonetheless.

No man is driven to procreate perse. Men are driven to do pleasurable things. Sex is pleasurable. The presence of birth control doesn’t eliminate the pleasure (well, too much).

Masculine men are indeed having lots of sex. And they are having lots of kids. They just aren’t being fathers or getting married. Most children in the next generation will be raised by low IQ single mothers who were impregnated by masculine low IQ men that didn’t stick around.

High IQ men and women will continue to stagnate or decline in numbers.

and, it should be noted, by “masculine”, asdf could just as easily mean men with game, aka charisma. or humor. or tallness. or strength. or creativity. or wit. or sexy aloofness. or outcome independent attitude. etc etc. the attractiveness traits that women judge men by are far more extensive and varied than the attractiveness traits by which men judge women, which amount to pretty much “how hot is she?”. the difference is that men’s attractiveness is judged relative to other men, and to women, and so male status is the ultimate criteria underlying women’s judgments. women’s attractiveness is largely objective, as beauty has a strong objective basis. just ask any photoshop editor.

widely available contraceptives long ago severed the connection between sex and procreation. we, men and to a lesser extent women, are not wired to desire children. we are wired to desire sex, which in the ancestral environment (99.9% of our history as a species) meant having children. that alpha males do or do not have more or less children than beta males doesn’t tell us much about men’s relative statuses, despite the best data mining efforts of the GSS crowd. the only fact that matters in the sexual market is who is having sex with whom, and how often. and on that count, beta provider males — though they may eventually find their 30 year old soulmate and pop out a couple of kids later in life — are losing the battle for sexual access to young women in their sexiest primes to love-em-and-leave-em alpha males.

Not true at all, we are strongly selecting for low IQ, violence and alpha personality traits. Once you get to the demographic of women that simply have IQs too low to use birth control consistently you see thugs out-reproducing hard-working betas considerably. And the underclass is the only group besides the ultra-religious and the ultra-rich that bothers to breed. In the US they vastly outnumber the ultra-rich, in Europe they also vastly outnumber the ultra-religious.

If there is an educational gap shouldn’t it necessarily lead to hypergamy? Shouldn’t there be a conservation equation linking (1) educational-gap, (2) hypergamy, (3) marriage-rate, and the (4) male-female ratio? If you knew three can you estimate the fourth?

i.e. If all you have are highly educated females, men can either marry up or stay unmarried?

Yeah, this. The degree to which a woman prefers to hook up with more economically successful men, all else equal, doesn’t change very much as the woman gets richer (well, maybe a bit if you look at American vs. 3rd World women in America, but that’s a big gap). The degree to which a woman prefers to marry more economically successful men, all else equal, decreases quite a bit as she gets richer.

lol: “extreme hypergamy theorists”. Could there be a more charitable term for the game bloggers who move beyond advice on pick-up tactics and into bullshit evo-psych based jingotastic race-war “social science” theorizing?

I think he is referring to just literally the people who are strong champions of the hypergamy theory. The set of such people could have a large intersection with the sort of folks you mentioned, but I fail to see why you should insist on conflating the two. Unless you want to use your rhetoric to hijack discussions into the narrow bylanes that you find comfortable.

Bravo, db. Well said. But I don’t mind the Roissy crowd, they crack me up. And they only came into being with the internet, where they can project their mastery of ‘game’ anonymously from their computers, spilling Mountain Dew on their Tomb Raider T-shirts and fantasizing that if they read just one more Roissy post they might get laid for the second time.

I’m just saying it’s all internet-enabled mental masturbation. More attractive guys have been getting laid more than less attractive ones since the division of sexes at the beginning of animal evolution. Spending hours giving names to it all like ‘game’ and ‘alpha’ and so on is just wanking. What is all y’all’s point?

female hypergamy is a worthy topic of discussion because it is a different beast than the quasi-equivalent desire of men to snag the hottest woman they can get. the disparity in reproductive worth — eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap, men are disposable, women are perishable — has real world behavioral consequences in the sexual market. what anyone who’s lived a day in his life can easily observe is that women, on the whole, are far more discriminating in their choice of sexual partner than are men, and so the female desire to screw/date/marry up is an order of magnitude more potent, and quite different in the details, than the male desire to screw/date/marry up.

“gameboys” as you and other dark ages lefties and old skool traditionalists like to snark, are at the bleeding edge of male-female social and sexual dynamics, and the smarter ones with a lot of real world experience bedding the sort of women who have options in the sexual marketplace (unlike most economists) have found that the happy go lucky, free fire zone of the internet is a great platform and inducement to expound on these ugly truths for the make benefit of glorious relationships, while offering the sweet bonus that such impolite titillation really gets under the skin of the right sort of losers.

The game guys have some good insights into picking up women and dating. I mean, they better, considering how much time and effort they spend on it. It’s when they try to extrapolate that into some grand unified theory of evolutionary psychology and eugenics that I just have to laugh.

We should call the hypergamy in question income hypergamy, as income is but one indicator of fitness women look for. The authors are overzealous; it’s not the end of hypergamy, even just income hypergamy. It is the dwindling of marriage due to the omnipresence of hypergamy and declining male earnings vis a vis women. Women would still marry up socioeconomically if they could, the supply of higher SE men just limits that.

The authors do stumble upon the idea that once women can provision for themselves, they look for other traits in men, although they dress it up with more Jezebel-friendly language. Shades of the survival vs. replication value trope.

To what extent do divorce laws that benefit lower earning women “nudge” higher earning men to marry high income women? If divorce favored the husband or high earning spouse as in some other countries, would we see as many high edu to high edu marriages?

this is a good insight. how much of the lower levels of assortative mating on income/education in the past were a result of divorce laws that were less antagonistic toward men, allowing higher ses men to marry lower ses but prettier women? nowadays, with divorce theft rampant, it has to be a consideration in the back of a high ses man’s head that the cute as a button waitress could leave him broke and houseless if she gets an itch to eatpraylove.

Civilization is built on the pretense that husbands are alpha males so that they don’t revolt against those in positions of authority. The 60s exploded that pretense leaving the glass ceiling protecting those positions of authority as the real alpha males surrounding themselves by de facto harems. It has take decades, but the consequences are now coming home to roost in the form of high fertility rates among patriarchal immigrant cultures. Islam is the the likely beneficiary since it dispenses with the hypocrisy surrounding de facto harems and formally sanctions harem sizes limited to a maximum of 4 females.

No one wants to even consider what the counterpart to female liberation might be. But consider: A female’s godhood is exercised when she chooses which genes will pass through her to the next generation. A male’s godhood is exercised when he chooses which other male he will meet in a natural duel to prevent his genes from passing into the next generation — or die trying.

If males are liberated, the glass ceiling would be shattered along with all positions of authority.

Divorce and remarriage are centralized in a minority of men in the West. For many, this means they leave behind a stream of women and possibly offspring. In extreme cases, they don’t even bother to marry and divorce—they merely cuckold other men. Both of these are less desirable for beta males than the situation in, say, Africa, where women do most of the agricultural labor because the environment lets them bear it.

In the West, although women are “farming” the managerial state because the environment lets them bear it, the alphas don’t even show the betas the respect due to men who care for the alphas children. When polygyny is formalized, there are at least roles like eunuchs which are formally respected by the alphas—rather than having the alphas and their harems continually trying to convince the betas they are actually homosexual, or “hateful,” or that there’s something “wrong” with them, or whatever.

It’s simply a more humane system than de facto polygyny because it is more honest.

Monogamy, or more accurately, the suppression of of polygyny, is an artifact of technology which allowed us to expand into other climates (i.e. harsh climates with low carrying capacity) where female dependence on male technology for reproduction was a fact of life.

So if the individual male is no longer the primary provider, then it’s Africanization time.

The pressure toward de jure polygyny is actually from the females although they would never admit it. Many women simply cannot maintain a fertile relationship with a man who they perceive as genetically a dead end—which, in the current vicious environment, is any so-called “nice guy”. But neither can they admit to themselves what, exactly, is bugging them. So many end up with no children at all. Moreover, many women who end up being kicked out of their positions as concubines to the managerial state—usually right around the age they are starting to run a risk of “difficult” pregancies—would be far better off if they were in a real harem with relationships with fellow concubines and their children that are not going to be terminated just because they are no longer fertile.

The much-lauded liberation of female “choice” — choice in sexual partners, reproductive choice, career choice, “lifestyle” choice, choice of social support services from the government — over the last generation is now a fixture of Western civilization.

The moral force behind this female empowerment is the extent to which it represents returning to individual females their sovereignty.

What about male individual sovereignty?

Under natural law the ultimate power — the power that shapes the future — of female individual sovereignty is the choice of which genes make it into the next generation and that power is exercised through birth.

Under natural law the ultimate power of male individual sovereignty is the choice of that which is to be killed in single combat.

Civilization is founded on a meta-stable “deal” in which females give up their individual sovereignty to their mates and their mates give up their individual sovereignty to the State. If, in this scenario, you liberate only one sex, not only does civilization collapse, but until it does, the circumstances are unbearable to the sex not liberated.

In Western civilization there is no going back to the age of females giving up their individual sovereignty to their mates, so Western civilization is ending and we are left with two choices:

Figure out how to legitimize formal individual combat to the death between males, or adopt Islam.

The foundation of civilization is defense of agricultural territory of individuals in exchange for those individuals giving up their sovereignty. He submits his will to a “higher power”.

In this contract the individual man is put at reproductive risk by the female’s instincts to mate with the strongest male in her environment, and a submissive man—the civilized man—is rejected so she can find the man causing other men to submit. The compromise therefore allowed the creation of a pseudo-natural environment within the family where the man could legally maintain dominance over the women. Remove this foundation and civilization collapses.

In nature, males and females have two respective powers: To destroy and to preserve. People think that civilization is founded on control of destruction and seem to forget that civilization also depends on controlling female power to preserve. With the return to females of choice, hence their power, something equivalent must be done for males, such as enforcing natural duels to the death (natural meaning just putting the two disputants out in the wilderness with one to return). Of course, no one can face that this is the logical consequence of female liberation, so civilization slowly transforms into something unrecognizable except, perhaps, to the eusocial insects and their negation of sex.

Some of the commentators’ obsession with alpha males is childish and misplaced, even in nature, alpha males don’t always end up getting the girl (see link). If you go around defining yourself as an alpha male, you’re likely just a douchebag…

Your comment is misleading. The link you gave (which was shared in MR before, I think) says in particular : “But although being the alpha had its costs, it also had benefits: alphas mated more and had more surviving offspring.” Plus the fact there are lesser risks for human alphas due to civilization. And then there is the question of what is easier to imitate with success – alpha or beta (I don’t know).

The whole “alpha” discussion seems a bit circular. Whoever is the mate women find desirable becomes alpha. So now we have in the comments terms such as “mental alphaness”, “income alpha” etc.

It’s almost like the No-True-Scotsman stuff. If women don’t subscribe to the stereotypical “alpha” stereotype, we’ll just change the definitions so that the fact that women go for the alpha still remains true.

that’s because often what qualifies as an alpha male really is context dependent. an indie band guitar player who just left the stage after a performance is going to clean up with the cute hipster chicks, but put him in the mailroom of a fortune 500 company and the women who work there won’t even notice him. the fact is, much of male attractiveness is relative status — relative to men as well as to women.

having said that, there are universal, objective and unchanging male attractiveness traits. women are drawn to the dark triad in men, for instance. (look up dark triad. there are plenty of links at the blog that tyler “cheap chalupas” pettily refuses to link). women love witty men, and charismatic men, and men who are a bit jerky and don’t cling so much to dating prospects. and it’s fairly obvious that women prefer men taller than themselves.

so that’s why the most elegant definition of the alpha male is the man who can *potentially* sleep with the greatest number of the most beautiful women and get them to push sooner rather than later for commitment. (i say “potentially”, because you have to account for the alpha males who have chosen monogamous dating or marriage for religious or ethical reasons.)

if that definition seems tautological to you, you would do well to remind yourself that often the greatest truths distill to tautologies.

Isn’t this “hypergamy” nonsense just a trivial implication of rationality? We’re all — men as well as women — out for the best deal we can get, which, in mating, means the partner that has the highest value with respect to our preferences. Duh. Why does this even have a name, and why is it supposed to be a special property of women? Is it because “hypergamy” with respect to education or income or dominance or something is supposed to be different in some meaningful sense from, say, “hypergamy” with respect to cup size?

That’s a disingenuous false dichotomy, implying that one can either view women as people OR examine their sexual/mating choices.

Not necessarily directed toward msgkings, but going beyond Disney-ian platitudes to describe female mate choice always seem to evoke saltiness from people who think female decision-making should be above examination, much less *shudder* criticism.

One reason for the “saltiness” might be that a lot of this discussion is pretty much thought-experiments and speculation. The only quantitative evidence I have seen so far is that educational gender-gaps and hypergamy are both reducing. Beyond that most of these 50-odd comments are at best hypotheses without the benefit of much real evidence.

Examination and criticism are both great but IMHO let’s use a little more data.

Civilization is gay. Well, ultimately it isn’t even gay, it’s just asexual or haplodiploid at best. But on the way from converting a sexual species — a species made up of individual men and women — it has to mutilate their individuality to mold them into cells. It does this by promoting gayness, and any other perversion of genuine sex (the 600 million year old kind of sex) that is expedient in service of “being part of something greater than ourselves.”

All attempts by civilization to be humane during this transition, such as the secular “Rule of Thumb” or the religions that place the man in authority over their wives and children (actually this was secular as codified in Roman law to the point that he could kill legally kill them) are ultimately to no avail so long as “civilization” is the overriding value.

At the boundaries between the civil and natural worlds are pseudo-men:

police (and other “first responders”), soldiers, frontiersmen (cowboys), etc. On these pesudo-men is heaped all the mutilated masculinity of civilization — a granting of temporary, revokable, strings-attached reprieve in limited circumstances.

Those not sanctioned to have even this mutilated masculinity, but who nevertheless exhibit it, are raped in prison.

Hypergamy is best understood within the concept of polygamy. Due to differing biological strategies (eggs are expensive, sperm are cheap) women will often prefer to share a high quality man in a harem then have a lower quality man to herself.

In a monogomist society mating is assortive and equal. If we imagine a 1-10 scale of overall desireability, a 5 marries a 5. An 8 marries an 8. Etc.

In a polygamist society an 8 male can juggle three 5 women, while a 5 male may not be able to get laid at all (and can’t find a 5 women because the 8 is hoarding them).

Hypergamy refers to the fact that women can only be turned on by those that are seen as higher value then themselves. When someone describes a market as being very hypergamous they mean that the top men have very large harems and the distribution of sex is highly concentrated. A less hypergamous market is one in which harems are smaller and sex is distribued more egalitarian. The more egalitarian, the more like a five can snag a five, rather then having to date down or not at all.

People aren’t driven to procreate (well, a little more mixed for women, but close enough for this discussion). People are driven to do pleasurable things. Fucking is pleasurable, so they do it. Fucking alphas is more pleasurable then betas, so women do it. The fucking is what we are driven to do, not the procreation. If a woman can’t get pregnant from a man after awhile her body may tell her to find another man, but she is just going to go out and find another alpha. Modern technology confuses the body, it doesn’t change its drives. Its cheat codes.

As to your question those most able cheat their drive to have sex without having children will eventually die off. Evolutions revenge for being too clever.

Rahul: “Do women fuck them because they are alphas or are they alphas because women prefer to fuck them?”

Why do most linked-to blogs get even more linked-to over time compared to others, when there is growth in the blogs, i.e. what creates the Matthew Effect? The reason is that all new blogs prefer to link to the most linked-to blogs, so “wealth” accumulates. In many contexts, certain certain attributes have such positive feedback loop process that is called “preferential attachment”. The answer to your post is both, and your question is false dichotomy. Beauty is normally distributed, whereas status is not, as it has preferential attachment process.

Assortative mating. Most men don’t have what it takes to pickup via venues like bars and clubs, and meet women through social circles or work/school. Women now spend more time in work and school, thus being near similar SES men for longer periods of time. It’s also harder for men to attract women much dumber or smarter than they are, and IQ is correlated with SES–rich men tend to be smarter.

These three factors stratify poor girls from rich men, not that such pairings don’t happen, just less often than one might think.

Yes. Also most men have realized you can get sex without marraige. Plenty of dumb hot girls are giving it away for free or almost free in bars. Or else, as the old craigslist essay goes, people rent their depreciating “assets” via Sugar Daddy type arrangements rather then buying them through marraige.

In a monogamous culture why would a good earning male want to marry the prettiest poor girl?

In monogamy the reproductive advantage is to grab the women of high value…the ivy league beauty and then have a few bastards. I’d consider that to be the preferred strategy most evident in the media in high profile Democrat politicians (probably more common of all political stripes)…think John Edwards, Spitzer, Bill Clinton, etc.

Most of the good earning men I know who work in third world countries end up marrying very pretty poor girls from third world countries. If more men don’t do it, I suspect it’s because they don’t travel in circles where they meet pretty poor girls.

Civilization is gay. Well, ultimately it isn’t even gay, it’s just asexual or haplodiploid at best. But on the way from converting a sexual species — a species made up of individual men and women — it has to mutilate their individuality to mold them into cells. It does this by promoting gayness, and any other perversion of genuine sex (the 600 million year old kind of sex) that is expedient in service of “being part of something greater than ourselves.”

All attempts by civilization to be humane during this transition, such as the secular “Rule of Thumb” or the religions that place the man in authority over their wives and children (actually this was secular as codified in Roman law to the point that he could kill legally kill them) are ultimately to no avail so long as “civilization” is the overriding value.

At the boundaries between the civil and natural worlds are pseudo-men:

police (and other “first responders”), soldiers, frontiersmen (cowboys), etc. On these pesudo-men is heaped all the mutilated masculinity of civilization — a granting of temporary, revokable, strings-attached reprieve in limited circumstances.

Those not sanctioned to have even this mutilated masculinity, but who nevertheless exhibit it, are raped in prison.

Civilization was invented by men as a strategy to survive and procreate. If you knock it down it will inevitably come right back. Genes find a way. And the genes of those that benefit from civilization find a way to make it happen.

You misunderstand. This is why absolutes are so terrible. A man can want a lot of things. All we are stating is that most men are driven to want a specific subset of idenifiable things in most cases. The thing most men want is pleasure. Being a father may in fact bring a man pleasure. There may even be an evolutionarily selected part of your genome that feels pleasure from raising a son. All that is being noted is that sex and being a father aren’t tied at the hip, and that the urge to have sex is more fundamental then the urge to be a father (the reasoning should be obvious, one is possible without the other, the same is not true vice versa).

Isn’t Roissy’s biggest theme that women in the West HAVE ALREADY learned to appreciate new qualities in men other than income and that in response a waxing number of men are less concerned about income and more concerned with, say, trying to look cool? What’s interesting about this hypothesis is that it implies a feedback loop where the more money women make, the less money men are interested in making. So far, the data in the U.S. seems to support this hypothesis.

But they are. The proof is in all the kids they aren’t having. And they aren’t having kids because they spend their prime fertility youth doing exactely the same carousel riding as low IQ women. The only difference is they use birth control more reliably, and they don’t have quite as much free time to slut around.

yes, and keep in mind (this is for the GSS nerds) slutting around — aka having a lot of partners — is not necessarily the only manifestation of a hypergamously unleashed sexual market where men’s earnings are subconsciously devalued by women’s economic independence. often, women, particularly those in the higher SES brackets, will spend their unmarried prime years dating only one or two alpha males as part of a soft harem. usually, these women are unaware, or only marginally aware, that the top dog men they desire and date are playing the field as vigorously as they are. and even when late teens to late 20s single women aren’t actively dating these top dogs, they are dreaming about dating them, and concomitantly refraining from dating, or marrying, the beta males, until such time that the prospect of settling becomes an urgent matter. except by then, the realistically available men have become decidedly less alpha than the brooding artists they were dating in college. this explains the commitment frustration of a lot of older single women and the sexual frustration of a lot of younger beta males.

so the primary SMP behavioral differences between high IQ women and low IQ women — or between SWPLs and proles — is that the former, as you noted, more reliably use birth control and avoid the travails of single momhood while being smart enough to settle when the settling’s still halfway good, and the latter have a stronger predilection to jumping in and out of relationships with sexy men who they know they have no chance of locking down into long-term commitment, but have less compunction about capturing their seed for life as a single mom.

in short, working class america is turning into an r-selection sexual marketplace, much like africa, filled with single moms and sexy cads and beta males pacified into distraction by cheap gadgets and unrestricted porn. the only question now, is… will white collar america follow suit? so far, they are holding out, but if later age of first marriage and lower overall marriage rates are any indication, they, too, will join their dumber, more impulsive sisters in the emergent matriarchy.

Some people destroy society by having too many kids. Some destroy it by having too few. Both are equally culpable.

As a demographic (if not spiritual) SWPL of 29 I’ve been having SWPL women near the 30 mark ready to settle down hurling at me for committment, and I can confirm their actions are completely in line with this post.

I recentely caught the season premier of Mad Men (the ultimate show for understanding what high earning professional white women want). Women spend their 20s trying to catch Don Draper, they don’t settle till the clock is up.

The worst thing that can happen is for one to assume their young twenties (when they moved to a new city, had no social circle, were making entry level wages, and had to try to fit into an adult world they knew nothing of and compete with Drapers of the world) represents their overall sexual market value. You’ll grow up. You’ll make new friends. You’ll get that promotion. And if you do your pushups everyday so age doesn’t hit your looks so bad you’ll be hitting your peak at 35 or 40 (the age of Draper in the show).

Some guys get trapped, especially SWPLs without a lot of natural game or looks. They start getting all this interest from girls they didn’t get before in their late 20s as they start to establish themselves, and there is a temptation to settle down. Don’t sell low. Your on the ascent. Those 30ish SWPL women will still be there when your 35 or 40, desperate as ever. If you still want a family, you can cash in then, probably for a better model. That’s understanding this stuff is important. It prevents mistakes.

I am old and broken down (50 with bad health), although it does not show so much on the surface, except sometimes in my gait. When I am not having one of my bad days, and I go to the supermarket, I draw all kinds of looks from women. i am very cognizant of it.

I never drew these looks when I was younger, although I was considered very good looking. Why not? Because I was Beta. I had great intelligence, but was socially awkward and not good at making money. Now I am disabled and still cannot make good money, but I get all these looks. Why? Confidence. I have it, when the pain is not too great. It does not matter how I am dressed, either. I have evolved into an Alpha from a Beta.

Confident men are strong. They can protect and provide for the woman and children. I am kindly, generally, but the hard-edge is clearly there. It’s a great mix.

Of course, I project a lie, because my body is a wreck. My mentality is just strong, now, and it shows in my body language. Women read the subtle clues.

Most people do not realize how much we depend on non-verbal cues for everything we do. When I was young, I had no idea of body language at all. I had none, and I could not read it, either. Alphas just have good, strong, body language. They do not have to say much at all to pick up chicks.

The guys who do all the talking and posturing, are really just trying to get themselves into that mindset, in order to have and project the confidence. They are not trying to convince the girl. They are trying to convince themselves.

One last thing, I think when you are confident, you project far more pheromones, and the women pick up on it. We are really just bags of hormones. We just think we are rational. We do all kinds of things for unknowable reasons.

Ethnic elites used to profiting from harvesting rural females for sale back in cities have, by motion picture technology, received so much power that they have managed to not only create a dysgenic situation where the most beautiful and intelligent women are harvested for lives as urban concubines—they have made it impossible to replace those females even with inferior breeds by raising the cost of reproduction to the point that even in the richest countries women cannot have replacement children because their sociobiological environment stigmatizes the men with whom they might raise children as unworthy of reproduction. “The Alpha of State” has become the Head of Household, leaving vast populations sterilized.

Outside of manifestly patriarchal cultures like Orthodox Judaism, Islam and some African tribes, the ethnies escaping this are seen by their women as not submitting to “The Alpha of State”—usually by being an immigrant to a foreign land and defecting, with the associated payoffs, from the culture to which they have immigrated.

Gentiles maybe. Every high achieving Jewish couple I know has at least 3 kids, 4 is the norm. Most Orthodox Jews have 7-8. In a few hundred years the white population of the US is going to be almost entirely Mormon and Jewish.

And they aren’t having kids because they spend their prime fertility youth doing exactely the same carousel riding as low IQ women. The only difference is they use birth control more reliably, and they don’t have quite as much free time to slut around.

This started happening during the peak of boomer fertility. Urbanization was shoving huge numbers of young first-generation-off-the-farm females into the New York City and other more urban areas, and in a state of desperate dependency on corporate harem masters, so the policies they (the corporate harem masters) had promoted were working just fine for them then.

It is de facto polygyny (sometimes called “serial monogamy”). Much of the reason policies like this are promoted is the regime within which corporate harem masters are given access to large numbers of highly dependent females. The de facto nature of this polygyny is what makes it a particularly vicious aspect of the centralization of resources.

Many women have been:

1. Left with children from other men
2. Discarded by corporations, governments and other organizations that paid them during their youthful fertility to be but office ornaments as part of “corporate harems”
3. Habituated to polygyny by triggering deep instincts relating to “independent women” and the implied harem size

It’s a deadly serious situation.

It is one thing to have a formal polygynous relationship, committed to supporting children and their mothers, and quite another for some corporate, or government, or other managerial elitist, go from woman to woman during “serial monogamy” perhaps leaving children behind but most definitely leaving degraded women behind.

Corporate and fed-government support for feminism starts to make a little more sense, as does their “marriage” to policies encouraging centralization of population and ruinous real estate policies that delay or at least profoundly degrade marriage for their sexual selection competitors.

Regis, in the words of Homer Simpson, “Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter…”

Seriously tho, the framework you’re offering is similar to if not the same as one I’ve been passively constructing, though yours is more developed. Do you blog elsewhere, or would you cite any particular sources that have been influential for you in constructing it?

Civilization was invented by men as a strategy to survive and procreate. If you knock it down it will inevitably come right back. Genes find a way. And the genes of those that benefit from civilization find a way to make it happen.

Polygynous humans are obviously better adapted to the high caloric availability provided by civilization than are more monogamous subspecies—as long as the technical infrastructure built by the monogamous subspecies holds together. Those are the genes that ultimately “benefit from civilization”. They’re not really the genes, however, that build the artifacts and niceties of civilization that people tend to identify (wrongly) with civilization itself.

Patriarchy: A cornerstone of sustainable civilization wherein the primordial group—the nuclear family—is rendered stable by the civil authorities deliberately portraying, through any means necessary, the male of the heterosexual pair bond as worthy of reproduction in the female’s eyes and the male is provide sufficient paternal certainty and resources to honor his role as sovereign to his family.

Civilization: A social organization characterized by the formation of cities—being organisms consisting of humans as dependent parts of the whole. This is reflected by Socrates in his statement about the natural history of the “state”: “It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal… The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficient; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.” (Note that this sort of dependence is qualitatively different from the sexual dependence of an individual on an individual of the opposite sex for reproduction. It is an asexual dependence that has sexual externalities which can be considered sexual pollution if not mitigated. This is why cities are associated with homosexuality and other forms of sexual decadence.) The ultimate “civilization” is a multi-cellular organism consisting of specialized clones. An intermediate is presented by colonies of eusocial species (bees, ants, etc.) wherein sexual reproduction is secondary to the propagation of the group.

Females: The component of sexual animals that creates by choosing that worthy of organic reproduction.

Males: The component of sexual animals that creates by choosing that worthy of organic destruction.

Gang: A group of males that subdues individuals by force.

Government or State: A gang that uses coercive persuasion.

When civilization advances, its first act is to capture the male function of creation by organic destruction—manifest by single combat between males—in group force. This is the origin of warfare. This is also the point where patriarchy becomes crucial.

“It is a puzzle for the extreme hypergamy theorists why the rate of marriage for educated women has not fallen lower than it has.”

extreme hypergamy theorists? oh, TCCC, you’re so coy. do you mind if I call you cheap chalupas? of course you mind.

there are a few glaring errors in your premature insinuations here. one, the marriage market is not the same as the dating market, although they overlap. the secret society of women’s true natures manifests a bit more… ah, recklessly… in the freewheeling singles dating market than it does in the marital market when the time has come to get serious about marriage prospects. how are the two markets different exactly? well, for example, a cool jerk jobless dude who has a fling with a 22 year old woman with no need of a man’s extra income would himself have no incentive, thanks to women’s choices, to increase his beta provider qualities.

two, income is not the only factor which influences male status. noting that educated, high SES women are perhaps “marrying down” based on income by no means translates to marrying down based on all male attractiveness traits. what the men whom educated women marry bring to the table is equally, maybe more, attractive than their raw incomes. high occupational status, for instance. or a powerful alpha attitude. or a quick wit. or simply raw social power over others. or even, heaven forfend, game. all of which would alleviate the friction caused by having a wife who earns a higher income. these things are a bit harder to measure scientifically, but that’s only because the nature of men’s attractiveness is more complex and situationally animated than that of women’s attractiveness, which is mostly a function of their youth and beauty and personality indicators of fidelity.

three, the marriage rate is falling for educated women, albeit more slowly than it’s falling for lower class women:

this is a difference of degree as much as it is a difference of kind. the jury is still out, but pew researched trend lines indicate that the upper classes will experience some slight convergence with the dysgenia of the lower classes, unless the lower classes can outpace even the worst prognostications about them. strong social mores may help insulate the wine and cheese set from the worst of the barbarian hordes’ cultural detritus, but then you have to ask what kind of country is it that requires such psychic defenses from its upper classes as shield from the wickedness of the lower classes? naturally, no one ever bothers to ask that. it was supplyndemandnopenbordersncheaplabor curves all the way down.

hypergamy, in the colloquial sense, is a deeply rooted, innate compulsion in women, as ancient as the dawn of sexual reproduction. it may alter its designated targets, but it won’t ever “go away” as these income-marriage studies are claiming. most women are incredibly loathe to settle, much more averse to the idea than men are at any rate. this is because the risk of getting pregnant by beta or omega seed has much more profound consequences for a woman than the risk of having bad sex with an unattractive woman has for a man.

although men are not a blameless sex, women are the final arbiters of who is having sex with whom. thus, men respond to the choices that women make. if women are choosing to forego marriage, long gestational dating periods before having sex, or the idea of only having children within marriage, then men will give women exactly what they want. men are the ultimate sexual adaptability machines; they will do what it takes to get laid.

financially self-sufficient women — particularly those not in the top 20-30% of beauty (and that’s a lot thanks to the obesity epidemic) — who subconsciously begin to devalue men’s earning power will respond to the revised sexual market rules by delaying marriage until they have out-aged the fun and drama of unwittingly participating in soft alpha male harems, by dating seriously only haphazardly or not at all during their prime years when alpha males aren’t available to them, by embracing the single mom life, or by emphasizing other, less economically tangible male attractiveness characteristics over provisioning ability. and guess what? this is exactly what the data — later age of first marriage, lower overall rates of marriage, rising rates of single momhood — suggest is happening. it’s no surprise, either, that lower class women who swim in a culture where any dysfunctional female behavior has been de-stigmatized and even celebrated by the smarter elites who practice otherwise, are most susceptible to the ill-effects of free reign female hypergamy and diminished male income and job status. fixing this won’t be easy, or necessarily possible, but it wouldn’t hurt to start with the premise that shaming societally deleterious female behavior is as important as shaming bad male behavior.

So if you do poorly in the sex market because the opposite sex has been ignoring you for a decade and then all of a sudden comes after you, how exactly are ya going to feel knowing that your potential husband or wife really would rather be getting it on with other people? And not “Angelina Jolie” but “that guy down the street who looks hot when he plays guitar?”

Yep, that’s definitely a relationship I want to spend the rest of my life in.

I’ve always found it amusing when “nice guys” find solace in the idea that women putatively “wise up” as they get older (and coincidentally, less attractive) and “realize” that nice guys make better husbands.

Congratulations dude, that woman wearing white standing next to you at the altar smiling has already been pillaged by a football team worth of guys or more. Hope you enjoy sloppy seconds, thirds, fourths… nth’s.

That’s right. If she didn’t want you when she was 22, why the hell would you want her when she is 32? My advice would be to practice game on such girls, then use your new skills and outlook to go after younger women.

But, don’t marry some aging out woman who has decided she has to settle. She’ll hate you for it. You’ll pay.

Exactely. If you want a family that bad, those 32 year olds will still be desperate when you 42, assuming you put moderate effort into taking care of yourself. Enjoy your 30s. The 20s are womens time. The 30s are mens time.

In 1998 the 203rd ranked mens tennis player beat the Williams sisters in straight sets one after another. Now imagine if affirmative action is applied to tennis, the remaining male players have to compete for diminished positions, the outcome will be a smaller pool of male players.
If that is applied across the board women will simply have to partner up (or share high value men or go celibate) with men they have expelled through affirmative action.

I find it peculiar that readers of this blog are part of the intellectual elite, and supposedly understand market mechanisms in many fields of life, but are at least in this context incapable of distinguishing between traits that are normally distributed and those that follow power law due to preferential attachment process. Beauty is normally distributed, and status is not.

When preferential attachment process is not socially controlled, “wealth” accumulates unevenly until it reaches unsustainable levels. Then the “force” of the preferential attachment process attracts equal but “opposite” force. In the context of economic inequality the counter-force is called a revolution. The only way to prolong this revolutionary cycle is to socially control the in-equal accumulation of wealth.

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da beernnakiifiers creates the feminist movement to 1) desoul womnz in sectiev assocking sessions in clollege and 2) reprorgram them to transfer welath from men, whether by hawking illegal subprime loans or via divorce court, whiee 3) teaching them to excel at their preemptive war on teh unborn killing over 50,000,000 innoccoentz zlzozoozo

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It is a puzzle for the extreme hypergamy theorists why the rate of marriage for educated women has not fallen lower than it has.

Indeed. I’m not an *extreme* hypergamy theorist, but I’d say it is that choosing males based on IQ and time discounting is an evolutionary novel behavior. In time it will either become the norm, or we’ll get Idiocracy. I’m not sure which.

Alternately, it is purely a social construct. Hypergamy is real because human nature exists, but human nature is on a leash. Thus subcultures that value high IQ’s and small time preferences will succeed.

Income doesn’t mean much in a woman’s attraction circuitry. It’s like if the female hindbrain intuits that cash and even wealth are luck dependent. The only things that matter are the personality traits that allow status acquisition/wealth accumulation.
It’s perhaps one of the toba catastrophe theory effects. Women select those who can fend for themselves in a scarce environment. A beta nerd who happens to be rich in a pampered civilization won’t last a full month in the serengeti. Send him to prison, and he will be a biker’s b***h.
I think there lies the difference between hypergamy in the wikipedia sense, and hypergamy according to “extreme hypergamy theorists”. Marriage of educated women hasn’t fallen because there is a large pool of beta males who don’t mind the sloppy nths.

Men are crazy getting married in this legal environment. Pump and dump. Pump and dump, then do it some more. Finding females for sex is simply a numbers game anyway. Most men fail at it because they hate rejection, but you learn bat in order get to the 9th inning.

A commenter earlier noted that the average age of marriage between men and women has decreased to a single year difference, to account for more older women marrying and dating younger men. While this seems intuitive to some, the facts actually show the opposite. The gap has INCREASED from 1.7 years to 2.1 years in the last ten years.

And these studies portend an increasing market for bridges in Brooklyn, NY, and for beachfront property in Arizona and Oklahoma. Hypergamy will decline when women realize that our muslim friends’ solution of treating women like property and abusing any of them who don’t like that might not be the best idea… and not before (many of our left/liberal feminists haven’t yet).

I posted earlier about confidence being the key to being Alpha. Well, it used to be that monogamous men in this country were still Alphas. They were mature. They were adults. They left childish things behind at an early age, often doing a man’s work at 12 or so. By the time they were grown, they were ready to take on the responsibilities of being a man, that is, to have a wife and children. They were Men.

Today, they are just overgrown boys. They mature too slowly. About the time they hit 30, they are about ready. They are strong and confident, and women flock to them. Women will marry earlier than the average, when she finds that strong, confident man. They boink as need be until then.

The feminized society we have today, where men are not allowed to be men, where men’s values are discounted, even sneered at, delays the maturing of boys into men. Women want strong men. The feminists like to tell them otherwise.

The bad-boy appeal is a trope. They are not really strong. They do not have the strength to stick around. It’s why women like the appeal of the seeming of strength, but wouldn’t actually want to marry one, because it is not real strength. It is pseudo-strength; an act; a romance novel; porn for women; cotton candy, rather than a meal. Women know it, so they boink it, but do not marry it. They really do know it is just a boink fest.

And just for the record, the sex is far better, and generally more frequent, in a long-term relationship, dudes. So is the food. (Well, the food used to be. Effing women no longer know how to effing cook!)

You’ve got it: not strong, just antisocial (short term fun, they can’t tell the difference or don’t want-to anyway). Character and foresight are for losers (i.e., “Beta”) now because we’re spoiled now… sorta like grade school.

Didn’t read the thread, so this may have been brought up before. Very low educational attainment poor people, mostly minorities, cannot afford to marry; marriage would cause them to lose government subsidies for single mothers. I once met a couple in this position, they had a child, and wanted to marry, but were too poor to live without the tiny ‘single mom’ subsidy the mother was getting.

With the rare(I’m talking below 1%)exception, all women want kids. Many are simply postponing it until after college. If a girl has no higher education plans she wants to have the kid of the guy she is sleeping with on a regular basis. She may deny it by saying he’s a jerk or he won’t commit or some other backward smokescreen, but the desire or “instinct” is probably more accurate a word, is there. The use of contraception is irrelevant to to all of this.

And the the myth about women not wanting to marry an alpha?..puhleeze. When was the last time you have heard of any woman anywhere turning down a marriage proposal from an alpha? In reality its because you would have to get the father her brothers and cousins all armed with shotguns and a pack of bloodhounds to track his ass down and drag him to the altar.

There is no power shift towards women in the marriage pool, just more propaganda as guys are becoming more aware.